Can someone help me understand the heat gauge?

[Cabalabob]

So just picked up MCH and this heat gauge is a weird mechanic to me.

First off the description. It says when overheated it increases damage by 10%. Is this 10% on top of the 5% from gauss barrel? Or does it replace the 5% from gauss barrel, in other words, is overheated, in total, a 15% damage increase or a 10% damage increase?

Next, do I want to overheat it? Overheat seems to be a bonus and, at least right now at 60, there seem to be no advantages to not overheating it. Yet all my skills want to stop me overheating it. Ammo stops the heat increase, quick reload reduces the heat and I just got cooldown which greatly reduces the heat for an attack that's weaker than clean shot.

[Muziko]

Looking over the skills I think the idea is to overheat during wildfire and get as many host potency attacks in while you can then stay between 50 abs 95 while you wait for your next wildfire rotation. As for the percent buff I'm not sure. Still leveling my mch.

[Cabalabob]

That was my first thought, but then ammo stopping and reducing the heat gauge seems really counter intuitive. Do I just not use ammo until I'm overheated? Do I just spam hot shot for the extra 5 heat gauge per GCD to get there faster? That's what I'm finding weird about it, it seems like we want to overheat but everything wants to stop that happening.

[Greedalox]

I'm on my phone so excuse typos!
The heat gauge is something that at 60-63 you want to try and align with overheating your wildfires. Your 62 skill Cooldown will help this by reducing heat by 25. The magic occurs at 64 with a new trait that turns your 1-2-3 into heated shots that are MUCH more powerful than before! But these only occur over 50 heat and the 10 seconds of over heating. That is why you have so much heat reduction, to keep you between 50-95 heat. You are consistently strongest at this point.

As for asking if you should spam hot shot to get heat- no. It's a potency loss to hit hot shot that many times instead of just 1-2-3 your way back up if Barrel Stablizer and Flamethrower aren't available. Also avoid Quick Reload til 60 heat in this situation.

[Muziko]

That was my first thought, but then ammo stopping and reducing the heat gauge seems really counter intuitive. Do I just not use ammo until I'm overheated? Do I just spam hot shot for the extra 5 heat gauge per GCD to get there faster? That's what I'm finding weird about it, it seems like we want to overheat but everything wants to stop that happening.

Take this with a grain of salt since I'm still leveling mine. My wildfire rotation will be something like this at 70 (tweaks to be had I'm sure)

http://ffxivrotations.com/s7v

The idea is to get close to overheat > setup ammo and buffs > let flamethrower take me into overheat > wildfire > use as many ogcd and GCD as I can fit in 10s

[Greedalox]

Take this with a grain of salt since I'm still leveling mine. My wildfire rotation will be something like this at 70 (tweaks to be had I'm sure)

http://ffxivrotations.com/s7v

The idea is to get close to overheat > setup ammo and buffs > let flamethrower take me into overheat > wildfire > use as many ogcd and GCD as I can fit in 10s

Your Wildfire will be big but your overall damage will go through the floor because after wildfire pops you had already used both of your best means of getting heat back to 50 after the 10 second delay on your Gauss Barrel.

[Muziko]

Your Wildfire will be big but your overall damage will go through the floor because after wildfire pops you had already used both of your best means of getting heat back to 50 after the 10 second delay on your Gauss Barrel.

That's a great point. I'll look into a better way to optimize it. Thanks =3
-keyo

[Id_Slayer]

The TL;DR of it is, don't overheat unless you have barrel stabilizer to put you back into the heated shots because its a huge dps loss otherwise. You lose an incredible amount of DPS using flame thrower to go from 0 heat to 50 heat, and You can't use ammo while manually building heat back up with the 1-2-3 combo so you are even more at the mercy of random procs to help sustain your dps. As a community of MCH we are hoping flamethrower gets adjusted somehow to not be a total waste as an alternate to barrel stabilizer, or that overheat will be boosted in damage to counteract the long period of lost damage afterwards, or something. Right now it just doesn't quite make sense to discourage/punish overheating so harshly, but then make it give you a damage boost. It's a trap, basically. You think you want to overheat, but everything is so punishing if you do. I'm not sure if another job can lose so much DPS from a single incorrect GCD press and we're already lowest.

[Greedalox]

Snip

Flamethrower has 4 primary uses IMO. One is in a group setting opener that delays your WF a bit to get group buffs- so it is used to go to 90 heat from 50 in that case.

The second is that in dungeon settings overheating isn't a bad thing on trash packs, so you Spread Shot until overheating, continue spread shotting til 1 second left on Overheat and then Snapshot the damage bonus on Flamethrower for the full 10 seconds. It's very strong AOE in that sense.

The third option is when you don't have issues with overheating anymore and can use it as a 1 tick of damage OGCD.

And lastly as a booboo fixer if you're not very good at heat management yet.

[HolyNirvana666]

I just don't even bother with overheating. The amount of work needed to do the mechanic "properly" isn't worth the small dps increase. We're still at the bottom of the charts with or without an "optimal" rotation so why even care?

Just wait until they buff the damage wildfire and overheating do and reduce the time it takes to recover.